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Thursday, September 17, 2015

I'm Lying to You

Remember the old days? Before the internet—I used to read
physical books. Read poems that shook me to the core. I’d go to the back of the
anthology and read the 2 – 3 line bio and if possible there might be an entry
for them in the World Book Encyclopedia. Maybe not, if they weren’t white or
mainstream.

Of course I didn’t need to know someone’s gender (Evelyn
Waugh is a guy? S.E. Hinton is a woman?), or their orientation (hello! Go Tell It On the Mountain James
Baldwin), or if they were black or white. Countee Cullen was REALLY confusing.
I got the work though.

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

-"Incident" by Countee Cullen

Growing up I often felt like an outsider, so these words
resonated with me regardless if Countee was a boy and not a girl, regardless if
he was black, which he was, or gay, yup. I read blind.

Actually
it’s more complicated than that. More like: White man uses pen name Yi-Fen Chou
to get published.

The family of a woman named Yi-Fen Chou, who attended
the same high school in Fort Wayne, Ind., as Mr. Hudson, has stepped forward,
demanding that he immediately stop using it. “I’m just aghast,” Ellen Y.
Chou, the sister of Yi-Fen Chou, said in an interview. Mr. Hudson’s use of the
name, she added, showed a “lack of honesty” and “careless disregard for Chinese
people and for Asians.”

So . . . some white dude ripped off a woman’s name, a
woman of Chinese descent, appropriated her name for a contest which won him
best of the best in the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry.

This
reminds me of a story I wrote, no, really, I wrote it, that appeared a few
years ago in Greensilk
Journal called I’m Lying to You by Najeeb Asim-Wolfe.

At first I did
it just to see. Not really a prank, more of a lark. What could it hurt?
Certainly not my reputation already swimming in a sea of uncertainty. I mean
who would really know. And, anyway, does it matter?

Call it
frustration, the hard knocks of life bowling me over, utter rejection.
Desperation. Or maybe I did want to transform myself, be someone other than the
miserable person I was. The liar I turned out to be. After a year of submitting
stories to various journals I was ready to call it quits. I sat in front of my
monitor and rubbed my hands vigorously over my face, maybe hoping to pull my
eyes out. What was I thinking—that I could make it as a writer? I hadn’t
exactly gone out on a limb i.e. quit my job or taken out an additional
loan—Thank God! I was already in hock, debt up to my ears—though I did cut back
on my hours at work in order to write every morning. What was I thinking!
I stupidly told my friends that I was doing it, the BIG PUSH, come hell or high
water (Aren’t these clichés?). I’d either make it or not. Not.

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Quick Bio

Jane Hertenstein is the author of Home is Where We Live: Life at a Shelter Through a Young Girl’s Eyes (picture book), Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (with Marie James), and Beyond Paradise (YA fiction). See BOOKS
She has taught mini courses in memoir at the university level as well as seminars at Cornerstone Festival, Prairie School of Writing. Jane is listed on the Illinois Artists Roster. Roster Artists are certified by the Illinois Arts Council to work in public schools introducing young people to the arts. She lives in Chicago where she facilitates a “happening” critique group.